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Day: 2010/05/25

I am continuously delighted, and proud, to be part of a team that has come so far over the past two releases. And so – while Fedora 13 goes out into the world, and press, community members, and prospective users discover all of the amazing Features that this particular release has to offer – I wanted to take a minute to thank all of my Friends on the Marketing team who have worked, and progressed, and innovated, and inspired, in our contributions to Fedora 13.

The Marketing team has plowed through a lot of deliverables over the past 6 months. And there are a lot of ideas about the awesomeness to come. So, I’m going to attempt to name names – I know many of you have worked on multiple items in this list, but I wanted to call out everyone at least once for their awesomeness.

Members from many other teams – Ambassadors, Design, Infrastructure – for helping us out in cross-team activities and deliverables. There are too many of you to name, but your contributions are immense, and we are vastly grateful.

Marketing SOPs. What can I say – Mel Chua is a wizard, and an amazing teacher, and constantly strives to teach everyone TOSW.

Press Kit. Henrik Heigl – you are the man. You have taken your idea and run with it, and as a result, we have vastly improved our work in this area – and we will have a kick-ass Press Kit come Red Hat Summit.

Fedora Insight. Hiemanshu Sharma, Pascal Calarco, Stephen Smoogen, and our friends at Zikula – Drak, Mateo, and Simon, not to mention the work from so many infrastructure team members. This has been a long road – but we continue to make progress, and in the process, we have figured out a LOT about how to deploy new Fedora infrastructure projects.

Release Deliverables. Ian Weller, Ryan Rix, Justin O”Brien, Paul Frields, Rahul Sundaram, to name only a few – I know we’ve had many, many people contribute to this content.

Social Networking. A huge thanks to Jonathan Nalley – who stepped up, said he was interested, and started doing it. A fabulous example of someone seeing a gap, volunteering, and going ahead with a plan. Kudos to you, sir!

Marketing FAD. We had an excellent session in Raleigh a few months back – a big thank you to Ben Williams, Neville Cross, Max Spevack, The Lord of the Plow… I mean Greg DeKoenigsberg, Russell Harrison, Mel Chua, Paul Frields, Ryan Rix, David Nalley, and Henrik Heigl, for all coming out from near and far. And thanks as well to all those who participated and gave feedback on IRC – this is valuable help, and it is not forgotten!

Press / PR Classroom Session – Joe Brockmeier. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to come teach people in Fedora a few things – and thanks to everyone who came and listened to his words of wisdom.

Allegheny Students and Faculty. Thank you for your work on the many deliverables you contributed to – Feature profiles, spins web pages, working towards video, contributing to one-page release notes, among other projects. But most importantly, for teaching US new things – the Marketing team learned a lot about creating on-ramps, working with students, and working with lots of new contributors all at once.

To all the newcomers with inspiration and dedication to new marketing projects – Luke Slater with monitoring Fedora buzz over social networks, Garland Binns with doing keyword optimizations on our webpages, and Gerard Braad and Rui Gouveia, both working on making some of our international marketing efforts come to life. I personally look forward to seeing all of the new marketing projects come to life.

FUDCon: Tempe – I do hope this comes together, and to Ryan Rix, I thank you for all the work you’ve done with me on this. You rock!

I probably forgot a lot of people. If I did, I’m sorry – but I still love you! If you notice that I missed someone – feel free to call out someone’s hard work in the comments.

And finally – Limesurvey. Yes, folks, that’s right – my pet project, the first thing I wanted to do when I came to marketing. It’s still a work in progress, but – being that it’s my pet project and all – I owe a special word of thanks to David Nalley for two reasons. First – he has put up with my endless questioning of, “How on earth does XYZ happen,” and has worked on packaging all the endless bits, and apparently there are some really complicated things going on there. Second – he taught me something very interesting, which I inherently knew, but had never really seen anyone say it out loud. I asked him, point blank, why he was busting ass on Limesurvey, considering all the things he had on his plate – and his response was, quite simply, “You’re excited about it. And that excites me – and makes me want to help.”

And that response truly illustrates how I feel right now. We have many newcomers coming into marketing with fresh ideas and viewpoints – as well as community members who have been around for some time. In both cases, though, we have team members who are excited, who are taking ownership of tasks, and coming up with new ideas – and that excites me. And I can’t wait to see what we can do in F14.